This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present invention which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
In the past, the video encoding process was a linear process handled by single piece of encoding hardware. This implementation was sufficient because the codecs used in the encoding hardware were simple and finished encodes within a reasonable amount of time. A new generation of video codecs, such as the Advance Video Codec (AVC), have been developed to compress video more effectively to improve bit rate efficiency and provide superior video quality. However, the new video codecs have the drawback of being mathematically computationally intensive and, therefore, undesirably increasing the time period needed for video encoding.
Furthermore, there has been an ongoing effort to improve the quality of encodes by having codecs engage in multiple encoding passes. More specifically, having the codecs pass the content and analyze the content through multiple encoding passes. If the passes are dependant on each other, each pass must wait for a previous pass to complete. This increases the time needed to complete multipass encodes and, as a result, also has the drawback of undesirably increasing the time period needed for video encoding.
The present disclosure is directed towards overcoming these drawbacks.